When I first learned we were making a movie for our final project I was not excited. But what made it worse was after reading the script in class I had no idea what I just read. I had to read the script at home again and the play was still not clear to me- it was so choppy and fast paced. I didn’t know how we were to make this into a movie. But creating the storyboard and jumping into filming cleared the confusion. Now that we’ve created our film I realized that this process was very challenging yet enjoyable.

Since I did not want to be visually in the film I was the video editor. Video editing was very time-consuming and frustrating, but above all rewarding. It was pretty nerve wracking knowing all the footage lay in my hands and that it was up to me to put it together. In the back of my mind I couldn’t help but think that the computer would randomly shut off and erase my work or that I would accidentally press the wrong button and delete all the footage. But nothing of the sort happened and all is well.

I enjoyed the creative challenge of putting the pieces together. It was especially tricky to figure out how to represent the change from past to future. I don’t think I’ll ever make another movie, but if I do I’ve learned a lot of skills. One of the hardest things for me was accepting the fact that there are limitations and I could not fix all the mistakes. Also,  sometimes I wished that we had fewer and better takes or that we changed things while filming. But at the end of the day we all tried our best and as I look back at the film I am proud of our work.

I really enjoyed working with my group- they were a funny bunch. But I have to say that overall, my favorite part in this entire process would probably be putting the bloopers together. I must have watched the bloopers about twenty times. Also, I thought it was really cool to listen to everyones different ideas about how we should do a certain scene or represent our overarching message.

However, there were things about this movie that got on my nerves. One thing that I did not like was going through all the takes and deciding which worked. The whole movie making process was long and laborious. As the video editor I went through over 200 (yes over 200) scenes of the film. I chose the best scenes or combined scenes and so on. Because each scene was done so many times I had to watch them all then pick the top 3 and then try each of the three and see which worked best with the film. Not only did this take forever but I knew the scenes so well I started memorizing them.

The whole movie-making process is much harder than it seems. I never really thought about how long or hard it is to make a movie before but I now have some idea. Now I am much more aware of how much time and effort was put into every film I watched- how many times one scene must be done and redone until its perfect and the effort that goes into stitching the pieces together. But more than all, putting this movie together reminded me that challenges could also be fun and exciting.

Thank you Professor Healey and classmates for a great semester! 🙂